On Monday 25 December 2006 14:04, Kai Ponte wrote:
...
I understand that. However, I was under the impression that's why mp3's don't play out-of-box. Even though it's no big deal, I just had to update xine and amarok played no problem.
It isn't a copyright issue at all, but rather a patent one. Some idiot seems to think you can patent algorithms and therefore some German Company - Frauenhofer, I think - has a patent on the process to decode MPEG Layer 3 files. IIRC, the patent expires in about four years.
Yeah... As I already stated. By the way, Fraunhofer developed the technology but Thomson Consumer Electronics holds the patent, now.
A ways back, some good samaritan came out with LAME - Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder - to decode MP3 files using a different process than Frauenhofer. Unfortunately, there's some question in backwards countries such as the USSA whereby the decoding algorithm is under the same patend as Frauenhofer's.
Hence, Novell doesn't want to get into any legal trouble.
That's the reason to advocate OGG over MP3 whenever possible.
There are some who believe that the patent in question is written in such a way that should they decide they want to (perhaps should they simply feel alternatives begin to threaten their royalty stream) that Thomson could make a tenable argument that other codec schemes, Vorbis, e.g. (Ogg is the name of a generic container file format; Vorbis is the name of the audio codec), are also infringing and hence no audio compression scheme is safe from the MP3 patent.
-- kai
Randall Schulz -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org